With the arrival of online electronic communication, the floodgates to all manner of content have opened. This content rapidly becomes overwhelming if unmanaged. Users and information service providers must learn to distinguish between useful information and useless information in this digital sea of information. This problem is compounded when little or no reaction time is available to distinguish between useful and useless information. For example, the trade of financial instruments, such as stocks, bonds, and option contracts, requires constant updates of the positions of each financial instrument in the marketplace.
The value of these financial instruments, generally grouped into sectors, categories, or portfolios when associated with a private or corporate entity, evolves constantly. With globalization and international relationships between corporations, a hurricane occurring overnight in the Philippines can impact stock values of a corporation engaged in, for example, the sale of camping equipment.
For this reason, portfolio managers and owners of financial instruments generally must be on the lookout for information relevant to their holdings, be it likely to have a positive, neutral, or negative impact the values of their instruments. One method of meeting this need is to employ the services of brokerage firms or brokers specialized in financial instruments. Because of the large diversity of instruments on the market, brokers often serve as intermediaries to in-house experts in a specific field. As a result, if a portfolio owner owns one utility stock, a covered call stock of a mining stock, and an international stock, the broker serves as the go between and compiles the needed information for the client. The time needed for active brokers to provide important information to clients is often too great to allow for the information to maintain its usefulness.
Another method involves the ongoing review of news briefs and reading specialized online or paper-based publications in search of relevant information. This method rapidly turns into a fishing expedition when relevant data must be extracted from a wide variety of news sources. Once again, the time associated with the collection, compilation, and review of available data to distil the relevant information renders this method quite unsatisfactory.
Finally, a recent method corresponds to the online creation by portfolio users of a list of financial instruments at a website where a large database of information can be accessed. Each stock is given a hyperlink that can be clicked when information on the stock is desired. This method requires users to be constantly on the lookout for new information and is time consuming. What is needed is an automated method available for portfolio managers and experts for providing portfolio users and owners easy-to-understand news briefs relevant to their financial instruments in an expedited and efficient way.